Ofer Tchernichovski: For the male has nice colors and they can sing, and the female is grey and she cannot sing, they don’t even have a song system in their brain. This is a completely different brain. This brain is the brain that creates the songs, whereas this brain is the brain that judges the song. Their selecting males are also based on how beautiful and nice the songs are. So there is a transmitter brain and a receiver brain.

Let’s put them back.

I don’t know if bird song and music songs are the same but I think they share something. David Rothenberg will tell you that bird song is music. And I tend to agree on a personal level that the songs are very beautiful, they’re very appealing, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. But what is it? You can come up with an explanation that songs just as a function…female or tutor other birds in the territory. I’m not so much interested in those questions. I’m much more interested in how the songs come about, how the songs develop. And I’m interested in it because songs are so wonderful.

So here you see is a plastic bird with a speaker inside it. And we can play sounds from that bird and get him to interact with the flight bird. And you can teach the bird to sing using this robotic hand-controlled bird

So here we developed software that record all the sounds that the bird sing. You can see here on the monitor you can see the bird calling and singing right here, something in real time right there. Each of those computer is controlling eight of those training boxes independently. And you can see here the specter analysis of those songs. But doing all of this together allows us to look at every sound they ever make. So you can look at an entire development of a bird song and ask what happened to those sounds?

So we can look at the entire process of song development. And that’s very, very useful because we can then get an image of an entire song development.

The Music Instinct: Science and Song is a co-production of THIRTEEN for WNET.ORG and Mannes Productions Inc., in association with ARTE/France, NDR, Australian Broadcasting Corporation with the participation of YLE. Award-winning filmmaker Elena Mannes is writer, director. Narrator is Audra
MacDonald. Executive Producers are Elena Mannes and Margaret Smilow. Available in HD. Major funding for this program provided by the National Science Foundation, Mary Rodgers Guettel, NAMM FOUNDATION, National Endowment for the Arts, Rita and Fritz Markus, The Vital Projects Fund, the Irving Harris Foundation, Sono and Victor Elmaleh, Thea Petschek Iervolino and public television viewers.